July 28, 2004

Flies

Two Sundays ago, I went down into the basement to watch TV. It was early morning and I noticed all these flies. There were lots of dead ones on the floor and about 10-15 on each of the curtains of the two windows. I started swatting at them. I would kill just about all of them and then notice that more kept appearing. After some investigating, I realized that they were coming out of the fireplace! I sprayed insecticide around the fireplace and then taped all this newspaper over it, hoping the problem would go away while I went out for town for the rest of the week.

Well, the problem got worse. After I returned home this last Saturday, there weren't too many dead flies on the floor, so I decided to take off the newspaper. I didn't notice any more flies in the fireplace, so I thought all was okay. Was I wrong! The next morning B said he swept up around 50 flies that were dead on the floor. There was obviously something dead in the fireplace, but I had looked and couldn't find it. The next day I called a chimney sweep who also happened to get rid of critters. He said he could come by later that afternoon. Well, after about two hours, the chimney sweep was able to use his vacuum to retrieve the dead squirrel out of the smoke shelf, which is a shelf behind the angled wall of a fireplace. The flies are now mostly gone and I can breathe easier. [sigh of relief]